Friday

Aug.
13, 1999

Summer Storm

It's FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH. Every year has at least one of them in
it, but never more than three. This is the only one in 1999.

Construction of THE BERLIN WALL began in the early hours of August
13, 1961. The communist East German government built it to stem the
flood of people moving
to the West  about 2 million since W.W.II ended. By the time it
fell in 1989, it was a fifteen-foot-high wall running 28 miles through
the middle of Berlin, topped with
barbed wire and guarded with watchtowers and mines. Another set of walls
ran 75 miles around West Berlin, separating it from the rest of East Germany.

On August 13, 1942, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin wrote to British
Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and American President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, begging them
to reverse their decision and to invade western Europe. Stalin's
beleaguered Russian army had been contending with a German invasion for
over a year. It wasn't until two
years later, on D-Day, that a million Allied soldiers flooded into
France.

It's the birthday in London, 1899, of director ALFRED HITCHCOCK. He went to
school to become an engineer, but
got a job in 1920 with a London film company writing out titles. He got
his first shot at directing in 1925 and later moved to Hollywood. Within
a year his film
Rebecca had won an Oscar for best picture.

It's the birthday in 1818, West Brookfield, Massachusetts, of the
abolitionist and women's suffrage pioneer, LUCY
STONE. She paid her own way through Oberlin College, and then went
on the lecture circuit arguing against slavery and for women's rights.
In December, 1858, in
Orange, New Jersey, she refused to pay her taxes because women didn't
have the right to vote.

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Although he has edited several anthologies of his favorite poems, O, What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic & Profound forges a new path for Garrison Keillor, as a poet of light verse.
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